Our investigation determined that the
incident was caused by an employee who inadvertently misconfigured
the settings during a recent upgrade, which caused a database file to
be accessible from the internet. Our
investigation also confirmed that the only unauthorized access was by
the security firm who initially reported this incident to us,
which access took place between March 14 and April 23, 2018. The
security firm has assured us that all copies of the data have been
destroyed. Based on our investigation to date, we have no evidence
of any misuse of your information.

What Information Was Involved

The database contained information
related to a call to 211 LA County that included your name and Social
Security number, and driver’s license number provided during the
course of the phone call.

Interestingly (to me, anyway), they don’t
mention whether any medical information was involved, although
UpGuard’s report had provided redacted examples of people calling
for help getting resources for mental health issues, etc.

… A poll of 11,474 consumers commissioned by
market intelligence consortium DMA has revealed that 51% are more
than happy to hand over their personal data to businesses that can
offer a clear benefit in exchange.

Another important demographic is the “data
unconcerned” (26%), described by the surveyors as those who do not
mind how and why their data is used. The remaining 23% are the
so-called “data fundamentalists,” or those who never share their
data for any reason.

Twitter is
sweeping out fake accounts like never before, putting user growth at
risk

Twitter has sharply escalated its battle against
fake and suspicious accounts, suspending more than 1 million a day in
recent months, a major shift to lessen the flow of disinformation on
the platform, according to data obtained by The Washington Post.

The rate of account suspensions, which Twitter
confirmed to The Post, has more than doubled since October, when the
company revealed under
congressional pressure how Russia
used fake accounts to interfere in the U.S. presidential
election. Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and
June, and the pace has continued in July, according to the data.

… But Twitter’s increased suspensions also
throw into question its estimate that fewer than 5 percent of its
active users are fake or involved in spam, and that fewer than 8.5
percent use automation tools that characterize the accounts as bots.
(A fake account can also be one that engages in malicious behavior
and is operated by a real person. Many legitimate accounts are bots,
such as to report weather or seismic activity.)

… Two examples illustrate how the intersection
of business, technology, and ethics can be problematic. First, let’s
look at Facebook’s recent troubles. The social network sold
data to companies that were trying to influence the 2016 U.S.
presidential election. It also took money for nearly
3,000 political ads from foreign entities without disclosing who
purchased them. The results have been devastating to the company.
Many people have closed their accounts, and Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg has had to apologize and defend the company to inquiries
from the U.S. Congress and European regulators. It is unclear what
the long-term results of these incidents will be for both the company
and for Facebook users.

Google faced similar problems, but it had a
completely different response. In 2006, Google began operating
within the Chinese market under that government’s condition that
Google
would censor any content that Chinese authorities saw as offensive,
such as coverage of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. But
after Chinese hackers began attacking the company and the Gmail
accounts of Chinese human rights activists, Google reversed its
decision to assist the government in suppressing information. Google
has since taken a censorship-free approach to the market largely due
to the views of its stakeholders, who are mostly in favor of an open
internet.

… If you search around the internet, you’ll
find that most writing about algorithmic explainability falls into
two camps. Advocates for rapid technology adoption often argue that
humans are no better at explaining decisions than machines, and so we
should table the question to accelerate innovation. These rhetorical
arguments do not help professionals responsible for regulatory
compliance. On the other hand, critics demand stringent requirements
for transparency and vilify a “move fast and break things”
culture. These arguments can stifle adoption, as not all machine
learning use cases require the same level of oversight and
accountability — some decisions are more important to be able to
explain than others.

Judge
Carlos E. Samour, Jr., on June 29 ordered unsealed the court filings
surrounding psychiatric evaluations of James Eagan Holmes, the man
convicted of killing 12 people and wounding 70 others in the Aurora,
Colorado, theater shooting on July 20, 2012. As a result, the public
will be able to see, for the first time, the reports two independent
psychiatrists filed with the Court, and the treatment notes of two
University of Colorado mental health professionals who counseled Mr.
Holmes before his deadly rampage.

The
ruling may be of significance beyond Colorado because it instructs
judges elsewhere that reports of court-appointed psychiatric expert
witnesses are not privileged and that defendants
who place their mental state at issue in a criminal case thereby
waive their doctor-patient privilege in actual treatment records that
are entered into evidence.

State supreme courts do not always agree
with the constitutional pronouncements of the US Supreme Court.
State courts are free to cite more stringent provisions of their
state constitutions if they wish to provide greater protections for
residents. The Iowa Supreme Court did just that last week when it
shot down the federal court’s doctrine allowing police to search
any car at will without a warrant merely by finding a reason to tow
it away so an “inventory” search can be made.

“We accept the invitation to restore
the balance between citizens and law enforcement by adopting a
tighter legal framework for warrantless inventory searches and
seizures of automobiles under article I, section 8 of the Iowa
Constitution than provided under the recent precedents of the United
States Supreme Court,” Justice Brent R. Appel wrote.
“In doing so, we encourage stability and finality in law by
decoupling Iowa law from the winding and often surprising decisions
of the United States Supreme Court.”

"The
end result of Whren, Atwater, and Bertine is law enforcement
has virtually unlimited discretion to stop arbitrarily whomever they
choose, arrest the driver for a minor offense that might not even be
subject to jail penalties, and then obtain a broad inventory search
of the vehicle – all without a warrant," Justice Appel wrote.
"When considered in context, the inventory search does not
emerge as something for the benefit of the owner or driver, but
instead is a powerful unregulated tool in crime control."

Cybersecurity incidents are on the rise,
and so too is data breach litigation brought by plaintiffs who allege
they were harmed by the unauthorized exposure of their personal
information. Federal circuits across the United States are grappling
with the issue of what satisfies the Article III standing requirement
in data breach litigation, when often only a “risk of future harm”
exists.

The United States Court of Appeals for
the Fourth Circuit (“the Fourth Circuit”) is the latest circuit
court to weigh in on standing in data breach litigation. In Hutton
v. National Board of Examiners in Optometry, the court held
that the plaintiffs satisfied the Article III standing requirement by
alleging hackers stole and misused their personally identifiable
information (PII), even
though no financial loss was incurred.

Smartphones have helped tens of thousands of
migrants travel to Europe. A phone means you can stay in touch with
your family – or with people smugglers. On the road, you can check
Facebook groups that warn of border closures, policy changes or scams
to watch out for. Advice on how to avoid border police spreads via
WhatsApp.

Now, governments are using migrants' smartphones
to deport them.

Across the continent, migrants are being
confronted by a booming mobile forensics industry that specialises in
extracting a smartphone’s messages, location history, and even
WhatsApp data. That information can potentially be turned against
the phone owners themselves.

In 2017 both Germany and Denmark expanded laws
that enabled immigration officials to extract data from asylum
seekers’ phones. Similar legislation has been proposed in Belgium
and Austria, while the UK and Norway have been searching asylum
seekers’ devices for years.

… Over the six months after Germany’s phone
search law came into force, immigration officials searched 8,000
phones. If they doubted an asylum seeker’s story, they would
extract their phone’s metadata – digital information that can
reveal the user’s language settings and the locations where they
made calls or took pictures.

… If a person says they were in Turkey in
September, for example, but phone data shows they were actually in
Syria, they can see more investigation is needed.

Denmark is taking this a step further, by asking
migrants for their Facebook passwords. Refugee groups note how the
platform is being used more and more to verify an asylum seeker’s
identity.

Uganda
leader says social media used for 'lying', defends tax for access

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has defended
the country’s new social media tax, saying Ugandans were using such
platforms for “lying”, and squandering the nation’s hard
currency on fees to foreign-owned telecoms firms.

In May Uganda’s parliament passed new tax laws
that introduced a levy of 200 shillings ($0.05) per day for access to
a range of online services.

The platforms that have been identified by the
country’s revenue service for the tax include Facebook, Twitter,
WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, YouTube, Skype, Yahoo Messenger and many
others.

The tax, collected by mobile phone internet
service providers since July 1, is equivalent to about 20 percent of
what typical Ugandan users pay for their mobile phone data plans.

Even before President Trump’s new Supreme Court
nominee is announced, a fight over the choice is raging on social
media.

In the days since Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said
he would retire, partisan groups have turned to Facebook, Twitter
and other social networks with political ads. Some of the ads urge
voters to pressure their senators to block or speed the confirmation
process for Mr. Trump’s eventual nominee. Others oppose allowing
specific jurists to fill the vacant seat.

Judicial Crisis Network, an organization that
promotes conservative judicial nominees, announced
last week that it would spend more
than $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s nominee. So far,
the group has spent as much as $140,000 on a series of nearly two
dozen Facebook ads. Many of the Facebook ads are targeted at users
in North Dakota, Indiana and West Virginia, all red states with
vulnerable Democratic senators who are up for re-election this year.

… Demand Justice, an organization formed
this year by veterans of the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
campaigns, began running Facebook
ads on Monday urging voters to “stop Trump’s SCOTUS
takeover.” The group, which has said it plans
to raise $10 million this year, has also run ads opposing
Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Amul Thapar, three judges who
are reported to be on Mr. Trump’s shortlist for the Supreme Court.

… These groups, which are classified as
501(c)(4) advocacy groups, are not required to identify their donors
or disclose much of their spending. But new Facebook ad policies are
for the first time giving a glimpse of how money from these
organizations flows through social media.

In an attempt to avoid a repeat of 2016, when
Russian disinformation campaigns successfully exploited flaws in its
network, Facebook recently began requiring political advertisers to
authenticate themselves as residents of the United States and label
every ad with a “paid for by” indication. The company also began
archiving all paid political content on Facebook and Instagram,
including promoted news, in a searchable public database, along with
information about how much was spent on the ads and basic details
about how they were targeted.

News release: “Today [July 3, 2018], Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and
Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) released the Committee’s
unclassified summary
of its initial findings on the Intelligence Community Assessment
(ICA) on Russian activities in the 2016 U.S. elections. The
Committee finds that the overall judgments issued in the ICA were
well-supported and the tradecraft was strong. The course of the
Committee’s investigation has shown that the Russian cyber
operations were more extensive than the hack of the Democratic
National Committee and continued well through the 2016 election.

“The Committee has spent the last 16 months
reviewing the sources, tradecraft and analytic work underpinning the
Intelligence Community Assessment and sees no reason to dispute the
conclusions,” said Chairman
Burr. “The Committee continues its investigation
and I am hopeful that this installment of the Committee’s work will
soon be followed by additional summaries providing the American
people with clarity around Russia’s activities regarding U.S.
elections.”

“Our investigation thoroughly reviewed
all aspects of the January 2017 ICA, which assessed that Russian
President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign to target our
presidential election and to destabilize our democratic
institutions,” said Vice
Chairman Warner. “As numerous intelligence and
national security officials in the Trump administration have since
unanimously re-affirmed, the ICA findings were accurate and on point.
The Russian effort was extensive and sophisticated, and its goals
were to undermine public faith in the democratic process, to hurt
Secretary Clinton and to help Donald Trump. While our investigation
remains ongoing, we have to learn from 2016 and do more to protect
ourselves from attacks in 2018 and beyond.”

The summary is the second unclassified installment
in the Committee’s report on Russian election activities. The
Committee held a closed door hearing in May
to review the ICA on “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions
in Recent U.S. Elections.” Members heard testimony from former
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Director of
the Central Intelligence Agency John Brennan and former Director of
the National Security Agency Mike Rogers, which informed the
Committee’s report. You
can read a copy of the unclassified summary here.”

“While many technology experts and scholars have
concerns about the social, political and economic fallout from the
spread of digital activities, they also tend to report that their own
experience of digital life has been positive… Over the years of
canvassings by Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining
the Internet Center, many experts have been anxious about the way
people’s online activities can undermine
truth, foment distrust,
jeopardize individuals’ well-being
when it comes to physical and emotional health, enable trolls
to weaken democracy and community, compromise human
agency as algorithms become embedded in more activities, kill
privacy, make institutions less
secure, open up larger social divisions as digital
divides widen, and wipe out untold numbers of decent-paying
jobs. An early-2018 expert canvassing of technology experts,
scholars and health specialists on the
future of digital life and well-being contained references to
some of those concerns. The experts who participated in that
research project were also asked to share anecdotes about their own
personal experiences with digital life. This
report shares those observations…”

Technology is the proverbial double-edged sword.
And an experimental European research project is ensuring this axiom
cuts very close to the industry’s bone indeed by applying machine
learning technology to critically sift big tech’s privacy policies
— to see whether AI can automatically identify violations of data
protection law.

The still-in-training privacy
policy and contract parsing tool — which is called ‘Claudette‘:
Aka (automated) clause detector — is being developed by researchers
at the European University Institute in Florence.

… Early results from this project have been
released today, with BEUC
saying the AI was able to automatically flag a range of problems
with the language being used in tech T&Cs.

… In theory, all 15 parsed privacy policies
should have been compliant with GDPR by June, as it came into force
on May 25. However some tech
giants are already facing legal challenges to their
interpretation of ‘consent’. And it’s fair to say the law has
not vanquished the tech industry’s fuzzy language and logic
overnight. Where user privacy is concerned, old,
ugly habits die hard, clearly.

Your phone
isn’t listening to you, researchers say, but it may be watching
everything you do

You’ve seen the YouTube
videos. It’s a shaky-cam iPhone shot with
a wide-eyed someone giggling under their breath “cat food,”
or some other miscellaneous thing they allegedly never talk about or
search for near or on their device. The climax of this plot line
hits in the following hours or days after they’ve muttered said
random phrase, and they’re suddenly served an ad on Facebook of the
exact same thing they said before. Preposterous! It’s
the classic “your phone is listening to everything you say,”
conspiracy theory that so many people have willingly started to
believe. But, according to researchers from Northeastern University,
reported
by Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill, this isn’t the case at
all. After a yearlong study, they found no evidence that your apps
are listening to you, but they did find out that they may be watching
everything that you do.

A group of computer science
academics ran an experiment that tested over 17,000 of the most
popular Android apps in order to determine if any of them recorded
audio from the phone’s microphone.

… Using an automated program as a method of
interacting with the apps on the devices, all of the traffic created
was analyzed and the researchers determined that no audio files were
sent to any third-party domains.

… But, the researchers
did notice something else funky, according to Gizmodo.
Several apps had taken video recordings and screenshots of what
people were doing. These screenshots were then sent off to
third-party domains.

Free, encrypted speech has a few flaws beyond
yelling fire in a crowded theater?

India has asked Facebook Inc-owned WhatsApp
messenger to take steps to prevent the circulation of false texts and
provocative content that have led to a series of lynchings and mob
beatings across the country in the past few months.

… “The government has also conveyed in no
uncertain terms that WhatsApp must take immediate action to end this
menace and ensure that their platform is not used for such malafide
activities,” it added.

… Among the issues raised by the bill is a
vague requirement in Article
13 that requires popular websites—estimated to encompass the
top 20 percent of sites—to utilize a content filtering system that
prevents copyrighted works
from ever being posted to the platform. The other key
issue is Article
11, also known as the “link tax.” In an effort to push
readers back to the homepages of news organizations, lawmakers
want to charge websites fees for linking to news and using
snippets of text from articles. Both articles have broad
implications for upending the way the internet functions as we know
it today, but activists
have warned from the beginning that online encyclopedias that rely on
fair
use practices would have their very existence threatened.

Amazon
could be coming for CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens and over half of
consumers say they are on board

In an informal survey of Business Insider readers,
Business Insider Intelligence found that the majority of respondents
(57%) would use a pharmacy service offered by Amazon over their
current pharmacy. The data isn't representative of the general
population — Business Insider readers tend to be younger, male, and
tech-savvy. Still, we think the data provides a strong indicator
that retail pharmaceuticals will be one of the next industries to get
"Amazon'd."

Amazon: How
The PillPack Acquisition Is Shaking Up The Health Care Sector

… We expect that the move will force some
changes on the incumbents, but we don’t think that any of them will
be waving a white flag anytime soon. As an example, just last week
CVS announced that it will begin shipping prescriptions nationwide
for a nominal $4.99 fee. Walgreens also offers the same one-day
service for $19.95 (we think that price may drop a bit now).

Consumers continue to move away from basic cable
and broadcast television for Netflix,
according to a new survey from financial research firm, Cowen Inc.

… Netflix was most popular, with 27% of
respondents saying they used the streaming service most often. Basic
cable came in second place at 20%, and broadcast television was third
with 18%. YouTube, Hulu, Amazon
Prime Video followed. Premium cable channels such as Showtime, HBO
and Cinemax were next.

Five people were killed by a mob in India on
Sunday after rumors spread on social media that they were child
traffickers, the latest in a string of lynchings tied to fake social
media messages that have left officials stunned and grappling with
ways to control the rising violence.

More than a dozen people have been killed across
India since May in violence fueled mainly by messages on the WhatsApp
service. The cases largely feature villagers, some of whom may be
using smartphones for the first time.

… In recent days, officials of WhatsApp —
owned by Facebook and based in Menlo Park, Calif. — have introduced
a new function that allows administrators of groups to control which
members can post messages, and the company is testing a plan to label
which messages are forwards. WhatsApp is expanding outreach in India
as its 2019 general election looms and political parties are signing
up “WhatsApp warriors” by the thousands — who, in some cases,
spread incendiary content themselves.

I see many many problems with this. A good
discussion topic for my students.

"We are talking about the government actively
seeking out children’s social media accounts, both public and
private, and combining this information with existing law enforcement
or social services records to profile which students are threats,"
Amelia Vance, of the Future of Privacy Forum, told the commission,
saying that such programs should targeted at only "the most
serious threats."

Facebook’s
disclosures under scrutiny as federal agencies join probe of tech
giant’s role in sharing data with Cambridge Analytica

A federal investigation into Facebook’s sharing
of data with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica has broadened
to focus on the actions and statements of the tech giant and now
involves multiple agencies, including the Securities and Exchange
Commission, according to people familiar with the official inquiries.

Representatives for the FBI, the SEC and the
Federal Trade Commission have joined the Department of Justice in its
inquiries about the two companies and the sharing of personal
information of 71 million Americans

… The questioning from federal investigators
centers on what Facebook knew three years ago and why the company
didn’t reveal it at the time to its users or investors, as well as
any discrepancies in more recent accounts, among other issues,
according to these people.

… The probe by the FTC, which oversees
consumer privacy, concerns whether Facebook violated a 2011 consent
decree regarding its privacy practices. An FTC fine could
potentially reach
into the billions of dollars.

Vanity
Fair/Hive: “I Was Devastated: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who
Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets. Berners-Lee has seen
his creation debased by everything from fake news to mass
surveillance. But he’s got a plan to fix it…

“…Berners-Lee, who never directly profited off
his invention, has also spent most of his life trying to guard it.
While Silicon Valley started ride-share apps and social-media
networks without profoundly considering the consequences, Berners-Lee
has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. From
the beginning, in fact, Berners-Lee understood how the epic power of
the Web would radically transform governments, businesses, societies.
He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands,
become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously
observed of his own creation…

He is now embarking on a third
act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and,
notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for
some time, been working on a new software, Solid, to reclaim the Web
from corporations and return it to its democratic roots…”

… Operating under the name Jump Bikes, Uber’s
service will compete in an increasingly crowded shared services
market that has been ramping up ever since dockless, electric
scooters started appearing in downtown areas around the country
months ago.

… The ride-hailing company acquired Motivate,
the operator of Capital Bikeshare and New York’s Citi Bike, among
other bikeshare services, in a deal believed to be valued at least
$250 million. The company will introduce “Lyft Bikes,” seizing
on the momentum around dockless and pedal-assist e-bikes in major
U.S. cities

Monday, July 02, 2018

I’m (so easily and frequently) confused. Isn’t
this how the government tried to stop Phil Zimmerman from selling the
PGP encryption software? Claiming it was a product restricted from
export or some such. Is anything being exported here?

Flash
Gordon (@s7nsins), a mysterious Twitter user based in New
Zealand, announced in a tweet that the US Department of Homeland
Security’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent Twitter an
export enforcement subpoena in April to disclose the real
identity of the person behind the account.

ICE demanded private information such as name,
address, phone number, credit cards linked to the account, IP address
history, complaints filed against the account and any other
information that might lead to identifying Flash Gordon. Private
messages and similar content were not requested, as a court order is
necessary.

… The reasons behind the demand were not
explained, but ICE could be interested in uncovering the person’s
identity because the account has regularly released information about
data breaches and leaked information found on unencrypted servers.

… But serving an export enforcement subpoena
-- used in cases to investigate US export law violations – is
almost unheard of in the case of a data breach involving private and
personal information, according to one export controls attorney.

"As a general matter, the subpoena is likely
to relate to the development or production of a controlled item, and
not names, addresses, and contact information," said the
attorney in a phone call, who asked not to be named to avoid any
conflicts with his work.

The attorney said that if the subpoena related to
the
ALERRT breach that this would be "a misuse" of the
subpoena power, as the exposed personal data wouldn't be an export
control matter.

… The attorney said it's "not clear how a
Twitter account could even be relevant in an export control
investigation," calling the case a "head scratcher."

The data breach finder said he's been left without
answers, and doesn't know which offending tweets – if any – led
to the legal process. As we covered last year, several prominent
security researchers and data breach hunters spoke
of a "chilling effect" on their work.

Gosh, what a shock. Only 102 state and 57 federal
taps were encrypted.

DCReport.com: Law
Enforcement Sought 3,800 Taps—Not
One Request Rejected—And It’s Not All Drug Dealers,
David Cay Johnston: “The number of court-approved
federal wiretaps rose 30% during Donald Trump’s first year in
office, the latest indicator sign of how his administration is
shifting our government from facilitating a healthy society into
something closer to a police state. Not a single wiretap request,
federal or state, was rejected by any judge, an annual disclosure
report from the federal courts released on Wednesday. Nearly
all the taps were of mobile phones. The report does not
include national security intercepts–where, according to a separate
report, judges rejected more requests last year than they had, in
total, over the 38 years before that. As for the new wiretapping
report, while of 3,813 taps were sought and approved, that almost
certainly understates the actual number by close to a thousand.
That’s because each year many officials were slow complying with
the annual disclosures that Congress requires. Based on reports in
the previous decade, which had to be revised because officials were
late reporting approved wiretaps, as Congress requires they do
annually. When the late reports are counted and disclosed next year
it is likely that the increase in wiretaps will be not 30% but well
more than 40%…”

WSJ (paywall) – “Facebook
Inc. disclosed it gave dozens of companies special access to user
data, detailing for the first time a spate of deals that
contrasted with the social network’s previous public statements
that it restricted personal information to outsiders in 2015. The
deals with app developers, device and software makers, described in
747
pages of documents released to Congress late on Friday / govdoc
no paywall [June 29, 2018] represent Facebook’s most granular
explanation of exemptions that previously had been revealed by The
Wall Street Journal and other news organizations. The revelations
come as lawmakers have demanded accountability at Facebook for
allowing companies access to data on its billions of users without
their knowledge, and questioned how far the universe of firms
extends. Facebook said in Friday’s document that the special deals
were required to give app developers time to become compliant with
changes in its policies, and to enable device and software makers to
create versions of the social network for their products. The
company revealed it was still sharing information of users’
friends, such as name, gender, birth date, current city or hometown,
photos and page likes, with 61 app developers nearly six months after
it said it stopped access to this data in 2015. Facebook said it
gave these 61 firms—which ranged from the dating app Hinge to
shipping giant United Parcel Service Inc.—a six-month extension for
them to “come into compliance” with the 2015 policy. In
addition, five other companies “theoretically could have accessed
limited friends’ data” because of access they received as part of
a Facebook experiment, the company said in the document…”

As more data is gathered, more laws must be
complied with. Does the strictest regulation always rule?

… It’s unclear just how Amazon plans on
integrating PillPack into the rest of its offerings, with rumors of a
Prime
Prescriptions service or something similarly ominous.

One catch for Amazon, though: Federal regulations
stipulating that private medical data, such as prescription
histories, can’t be used for marketing purposes like the behavioral
tracking Amazon uses to pump up its retail model. According to the
Wall
Street Journal, the company only has a few limited ways to
proceed with patient data: It could compartmentalize the PillPack
business into its own unit with limited data-sharing with the rest of
Amazon, or it could reorganize the entire Amazon business to become
compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act (HIPAA), which would probably be more trouble than it’s worth.

… The revolt is part of a growing political
[not Ethical?
Bob] awakening among some tech employees about the uses of
the products they build. What began as concern inside Google about a
Pentagon contract to tap the company’s artificial-intelligence
smarts was catalyzed by outrage over Trump administration immigration
policies. Now, it seems to be spreading quickly.

Of the numerous humanitarian applications of
blockchain that are being tested, and in some cases already used
around the world, implementing cryptocurrency in places where
populations are under-served by financial institutes is considered a
winner.

Poor countries or island nations with rural people
living far from city centers, who have had no chance at getting loans
to create a small business or to take payments from family members
working abroad through the banking system, can now by using Bitcoin
or any number of cryptocurrencies.

Normally it is countries in Africa, South East
Asia, or South America that are presented as case studies for the use
of digital money. But the number of Bitcoin ATMs popping up in poor
inner-city neighborhoods in the US are being used for the same
reasons. According to The
Virginian-Pilot, there are 80 Bitcoin ATMs in the Detroit area
and 2,032 across the country.

… OpenPhone
is an app for iPhone, iPad and Android. After downloading the app,
you can get a second phone number for $9.99 per month. It can be a
local or a toll-free number in the U.S. or Canada. You can also port
an existing phone number and get rid of your second phone.

… There are many advantages in having a second
phone number. You can set up a different voicemail, you can also set
your availability to control your business hours. You also get
voicemail transcription through the OpenPhone app.

OpenPhone uses VoIP and routes all your calls and
texts through your internet connection. You get unlimited calls and
texts in the U.S. and Canada as part of your subscription.

The
US Reportedly Has ‘Unequivocal Evidence’ That North Korea Is
‘Trying To Deceive’ Trump On Its Nuclear Program

… And though North Korea took several
steps to indicate it was in the process of dismantling its
weapons program, such as blowing up tunnels leading to a nuclear test
site, critics who monitored the development say it
may have all been for show.

“There’s no evidence that they are decreasing
stockpiles, or that they have stopped their production,” a US
official familiar with the intelligence report told NBC. “There is
absolutely unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the
US.”

Sunday, July 01, 2018

Even weeks after its discovery, Algonquin
College is still not sure how many current and former
students and employees are affected by a cyber attack that breached
data banks.

However, a news release on Friday
suggested thousands could be impacted after one of the college’s
servers was “compromised” by a hacker.

It is, after all, a huge educational
community: about 21,000 full-time students, another 42,000 registered
in continuing education and 4,400 full and part-time employees and an
alumni roster of 180,000 students.

It’s unclear what kind of information
might be at risk — personal, financial or academic.

“We have no reason to believe that financial
information was potentially compromised,” communications executive
director Scott Anderson said in an email.

… The college is conducting what it calls “a
comprehensive forensic review” to determine the size of the breach
and the kind of information that was attacked.

… The school said it acted immediately to
secure the server once it was made aware of the problem. It has also
alerted Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner.

… In March, Algonquin’s chief information
security officer, Craig Delmage, was part of a seminar in Perth about
cybercrime in which he talked about the vulnerability of many
corporate websites. He marvelled at the way hackers keep beating the
system.

“Yeah, we probably have hackers at Algonquin
College. But we can detect
them,” the Perth Courier reported him saying. “It
cannot be entirely prevented. You need to work this into your
business operations.”

When facial recognition cameras were
installed at a century-old high school here in eastern China,
students got in and out of campus, picked up lunch, borrowed books
and even bought drinks from a vending machine just by peering into
the cameras.

No more worrying about forgetting to
carry your ID card.

But last March, the cameras appeared in
some classrooms — and they did a lot more than just identify
students and take attendance.

Using the latest artificial intelligence software,
the devices tracked students’ behavior and read their facial
expressions, grouping each face into one of seven emotions: anger,
fear, disgust, surprise,happiness, sadness and what
was labeled as neutral.

Think of it as a little glimpse of the future.

If this capability exists (and it does) we could
hack into it at any time.

Danville police and school officials are
working this summer on an agreement that would allow police to access
school radio communications and video feeds during an emergency.

Dave Wesner, the city’s corporation
counsel, said the agreement would allow Danville police and other
emergency personnel to hear radio communications by administrators
and teachers during an emergency inside a school, such as a school
shooting.

The agreement states that emergency personnel and
law enforcement are restricted to accessing only live video feeds or
"video feeds that are reasonably contemporaneous with an
emergency event," and only from cameras likely to contain
footage related to the emergency.

I’m not sure I believe all these arguments, but
enough ring true to make this worth reading.

Mark
Zuckerberg is a single point of failure at a company that is
systemically important to the internet

Mark Zuckerberg is the founder, CEO, and chairman
of the board at Facebook. He also controls a majority of the
company's voting stock. His power at the company is complete. He
cannot be fired or disciplined. If the directors on his
board attempted to remove him, he could simply vote with his stock to
replace them with friendlier ones. It is unlikely the current
directors would do that because they are each paid at least $350,000
a year, except for the ones who are also Zuckerberg's company
employees — they are paid many millions more.

Zuckerberg has much more power than ordinary CEOs
at publicly traded companies, many of whom are held accountable by
independent board chairmen and directors appointed at the behest of
investors. On paper, everything ought to be going his way.

And yet Zuckerberg is at war with his own
shareholders. As Business Insider's Jake Kanter reported last week,
83% of independent investors — those stockholders who are not
Zuckerberg himself or his managing executives — believe
he should be fired as chairman of the board.

Perspective. Interesting that people are just
starting to notice this…

… The thing is, Amazon has always dabbled in
many corners of the tech industry as it's pursued its well-worn
mantra of "growth before profits." And that means the
company is more than the world's largest retailer. It's also an
Internet of Things company. A device maker. A payments company.
The list goes on. Some bets, like its massive cloud computing
service, Amazon Web Services, have proven hugely successful. Others,
like the Fire phone, have .... not.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.